This article in the Independent by Johann Hari got me out of complacency mode and back on the bicycle this morning.

If the environmental arguments aren’t compelling enough, surely the human ones are. People are murdered for Britain’s oil. How do you get away from that?

For example, in 1998, more than 100 ordinary villagers went to one of Chevron’s barges to ask peacefully to speak to the company’s managing director. They were told to wait.

They saw helicopters approaching, and assumed they were Chevron spokespeople – until the gunfire began. Two of them were shot dead. Others were taken away and tortured. The rest managed to flee. A Chevron spokesman admitted the corporation flew in the Nigerian soldiers who did the shooting – and that the protestors they murdered were unarmed.

Now, you may be expecting some tale about how I’ve decided not to waste any more money on cheap, sight-unseen goods off dubious online retailers. But you’d be wrong.

I’ve been trying to coach my son to be a bit more self-reliant getting to sleep, rather than just reading him story after story until he drops off, which is a bit like a sedative, really. So tonight I primed him - ok, I’m going to say goodnight now. I’ll come back in 5 minutes and see how you’re doing. Remember what to do? Close your eyes, relax and think of nice things.

So I came back in 5 (or maybe 8) minutes…

- I’m not having a nice time. I keep trying to think of nice things, but I can only think of yukky things.

Aw…

- Like, what if I fell down off the ladder of my bunk bed?

(Lots of reassurance about railings etc)

- You’re my nicest thing to think about.

Awww….

- You’re off Ebay.

Awwwwww….!

This is my occasional lunchtime-blog-from-the-cafe-courtyard thing. The reason I’m out here in the (lovely, fresh) spitting rain, and not all cozy and warm indoors is that I really didn’t want to sit at an andjacent table to someone I’ve never met, but who I have observed to be a bit of an energy vampire. I know I’m prejudging, but I just didn’t fancy having to deflect the inevitable invitations to be drawn into somebody’s world. Not wanting to be blunt or brutal, I chose avoidance.

The other day I picked up a friend from the gym. As she got into the car, she apologised for possibly being a bit smelly, as she hadn’t showered. ‘Not that you would say anything, of course!’ Which got me wondering, could I achieve that level of social honesty without alienating people? I tried it out, enthusiastically proclaiming ‘whew-ee, what a stink!’ and rolling the windows down.

We’re still friends. I think.

Just had a conversation in which someone shared with me some fairly personal facts. I thought, some of this is relevant to my experience - perhaps I should add my bit. I thought about it for a while first, but concluded that it’s good to share, even if it’s a bit revealing to do so.

The response to my personal revelation was “Yeah. Anyway…” and on with the agenda, without the faintest acknowledgement of the frankly quite unusual fact I’d just revealed.

My conclusion: just shut up and pretend to listen when self-absorbed types talk at you - possibly mentally composing blog entries to pass the time.

After all the excitement and anticipation over the last few months, I bottled my gorse wine tonight. Well… I transferred it from the demijohn into 6 wine bottles - but I didn’t put the corks in. It was awful.

Truth is, I’d been deluding myself from quite early on in the process that it was going to turn out alright. A nasty taste crept in during primary fermentation, and I kept hoping that it would work its way out. Even last week I snuck a taste and told myself it was ‘nice and earthy’.

But it wasn’t. It was just horrible. When it came to the crunch of asking myself ‘can I truly conceive of drinking a bottle of this stuff?’ the answer was a resounding ‘bleugh!’. So I poured it away.

Bloody stupid stinking prickly bastard gorse.

By the way, for the person who kept ending up at my blog via a search on ‘what colour are gorse flowers?’ - they are yellow.

The Muse finally dropped by a couple of nights ago and uncorked a geyser of lyrical joy… by no means the only song I’ve written recently, but certainly the most authentic - one that has just clicked and I know will be with me for a long time.

The main lyric, which came out of nowhere, with no meaningful intention attached, is: “You can get away with murder if you tidy up your house”. Which, when I wrote it, I clearly wasn’t doing. I was sitting down frantically scribbling down lyrics. Of course, I don’t really believe that you can get away with murder just by tidying your house, that would be silly. We’d just all go around killing people we didn’t approve of, and coming home and tidying up, and no-one would be any the wiser.

However, I have discovered tonight that what you can do whilst tidying the house is find the mental space to learn up the long and complex lyrics to a new song. So cleaning the kitchen wasn’t at all boring tonight. I think I may have forged some new neural pathways, which isn’t usually the case when stacking the dishwasher.

And it is a very wordy song. Although it doesn’t sound anything like a Bob Dylan song, it was quite tangibly influenced by Bob. I’ve just finished re-reading his ‘Chronicles’, which, if you permit it, can get right between your brain cells and speak volumes of sense to the inner songwriter. Reading ‘Chronicles’ tickled the part of my brain which likes to use the richness and vastness of the words of our language to dance around ideas that may not have literal words to describe them. And to have a lot of fun in doing so.

Also, to patiently persist with a song, to allow it to blossom fully. Not to jump up and run off once you’ve got a couple of verses down, but to wait around and see what other combinations might present themselves. So even though the song sounds frantic and hyperactive (no surprises there…) it is a patient song, and it took me a good hour to reveal the 10+ verses that squeeze into its 3-and-a-bit minutes.

The other patient songwriter I really admire (but hardly ever listen to) is Robert Smith. His lyrical style isn’t always my thing, but the arrangements are just perfect. He can pull such emotion out of an understated guitar line that 99% of guitarist-songwriters would just bypass completely, going either for something flashier or just a bunch of dull strumming.

Anyway, here are a couple more lines from my lovely, new, dumb song.

I’m not averse to experimentation
Just give me the test tube, I’ll chuck it in the blender
Ain’t got time for no argumentation
Does anybody know about carburettors?

…..

I’m so mean and so caffeine
Baby you’re so pure and full of chlorine
You knew everything when you were nineteen
Better tell the truth or your hair’ll turn green

…..

Keep in perspective, don’t be so reflective
Trade in your dreams for a key objective
Don’t tell no-one you’ve got red knickers on
I’m about as square as a dodecahedron

So anyway… carburettors have been an active subject in our house lately, leading Pip to advise me that I shouldn’t have one on my motorbike. I should have a motorbikeburettor. And I’m sure that’s why the damn thing refuses to start!

After a month of excuses (which started with Chicken Pox, but got progressively less valid as the month went on) I finally got back on the bike and cycled into work this morning.

The virtuous path is littered with rewards, if you count something like following a bumblebee for 20 metres up the road at eye level as a reward (which I do… maybe I’m strange.)

Of course there is also the fiscal reward. I drove past the service station the other day and marvelled at the price of diesel - 130p per litre! (For Aussie readers, that’s over AU$3… or £80 / $192 to fill up my people-carrier!) My immediate thought was that the only way I’m going to feel good about seeing that sign on my way to work in the morning is if I’m cycling past it. So I cycled past it this morning, and it was blank. I guess they were in the middle of putting the price up.

The other immediate benefits of riding in are the endorphin rush (cranked up ‘Whole Lotta Love’ on YouTube and enjoyed ensuing silliness around the office - not sure if my workmates did) and the internal thermostat adjustment - am sitting here feeling a lot less chilly than I was yesterday, though the office is apparently the same temperature.

Re: Whole Lotta Love. Isn’t it nice that Robert Plant measures his love in inches?

Today seems to be the sort of day where I’m finding everything a bit niggly. Still, I can’t help thinking it seems strange that I should be feeling defensive about Slim Dusty, and Australian country music generally.

For reasons which are unimportant, I drew the attention of my workmates to the existence of the LP ‘Slim Dusty Live in Wagga Wagga.’ Just because the title encapsulates a certain je ne says bloody what, mate. The response was underwhelming.

- What, is that some sort of approximation of Country & Western?

Me: - Approximation? It’s the definition!

- Oh, really? I thought Country and Western came from America!

- It comes from where there’s dry, dusty roads and cattle trucks. Take a listen. (At which point I call up ‘Pub with no Beer’ on YouTube.

- That’s an Irish folk song, that is. It’s not Country and Western.

At which point, in heaven, I’m sure Slim reached for his six-string to set matters straight.

Whatever. It’s probably just caffeine withdrawal… which is easily fixed. Slurp.

Seems I’m not the only one who gets excited at the sight of swifts. This from “The Miracle at Speedy Motors” - the latest No. 1 Ladies’ Detective book by Alexander McCall Smith:

The apprentice, standing beside her, suddenly tugged excitedly at the sleeve of her dress. ‘Look, Mma Ramotswe! Look!’

She looked in the direction in which he was pointing and immediately saw what he had seen. Flying ants. Suddenly, unexpectedly, the air was filling with flying ants, rising up from their secret burrows in the rain-softened ground, gaining altitude on beating wings, dipping down again. It was a familiar sight following the rains, one of those sights that took one back to childhood no matter what age one was, and brought to mind memories of chasing these ants, grabbing them from the air, and then eating them, for their peanut-butter taste and crunchiness.

‘Go and catch some,’ she said to the apprentice.

He handed her the spanner he was holding and rushed out in the last few drops of rain to snatch at the termites, a boy again. He caught some easily, and de-winged them before stuffing them into his mouth. Above him there were other, hungrier dangers for the ants; a flock of swifts, materialising from nowhere, had swept in and were dipping and swooping over their aerial feast. The apprentice looked up at the birds and watched them, and smiled; and she smiled back. What does it matter, she thought, if businesses are left unattended, if people are not always as we want them to be; we need the time just to be human, to enjoy something like this: a boy chasing ants, a dry land drinking at last, birds in the sky, a rainbow.

In typical Friday-evening fashion, after a beverage or 3, I was blabbing on to J about my week at work. She remarked that it was a long way from lugging boxes for a giftware wholesaler.

The thing is that I can draw a direct line between lugging boxes and the sort of work I’m doing now, since it was the giftware wholesaler who let me say ‘yeah, sure I can develop a data-driven, interactive website for you. Shopping cart? No worries, let me have a crack at it…’

Which was kind of foolish, but at least it got me into a vaguely cerebral line of work.

Then I started thinking back to what led me to working for the giftware company. Working for the other giftware company next-door… which happened because I ran into Sean on the steps of West End markets and admired his shirt (it’s from my work, drop by, you might be able to get some work unloading containers)… which happened because I was in the Fire Event at Woodford Festival, which Sean was in… which I got into as a result of being in a ‘Celtic Folk Opera’ directed by the Fire Event director… which Julie put me onto… and I knew her because we were in JC Superstar together… which I auditioned for because my best mate’s friend saw it in the paper… and I knew my best mate because Flash introduced us on a bus… and I knew Flash because we were in ‘Ubu Roi’ together at USQ… and I went to USQ because I complied with my parents’ wishes that I shouldn’t study jazz guitar at the conservatorium.

I think that’s about as far back as I can go. But it’s cool that I can have a decent job doing esoteric bits of coding in sleepy Mid-Wales thanks to a totally unpredictable chain of events… I guess that’s life, innit!